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Google AdWords falls foul of French competition regulator


Google has been ordered to reinstate a traffic warning website's adverts because its blocking of the ads without warning could be discriminatory. The French competition watchdog will make its final ruling on the case in the coming months.

Navx's website contains applications useful to drivers, including information identifying the sites of speed cameras. The Autorité de la Concurrence said that when Google stopped the site advertising through Google's AdWords advertising service, Navx's traffic and revenues were severely affected.

Google's AdWords policies bar the advertising of speed camera location services but the Autorité de la Concurrence said that that policy must be revised and Navx's ads reinstated.

"The content policy of Adwords was implemented by Google in conditions that lack objectivity and transparency and which lead to the discriminatory treatment of providers of databases on (roadside) speed cameras," it said in a statement, according to newswire AFP.

The Autorité issued its interim ruling in which it said that Google had acted unfairly in suspending the Navx account without warning and said that Google had four months in which to clarify its policies, according to the Financial Times.

Google told AFP that other countries ban the advertising of speed radar-identification services and said that its AdWords guidelines tell advertisers not to promote radar detectors.

The AFP said that Navx's revenues fell by 70% on the suspension, such is Google's search market dominance, and that the company had been forced to buy Google's ads because 90% of French internet searches are performed through Google.

Google's AdWords service has faced legal attack in France before. Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) took a case in the French courts that reached the European Court of Justice, claiming that AdWords broke trade mark law by allowing other companies to bid to have their goods displayed beside searches for its brand names.

The ECJ said that AdWords did not break the law in those cases but that other advertisers might.

French courts have fined Google in the past, finding that it does infringe companies' trade marks when its AdWords system allows companies to display ads beside the results of searches for third parties' trade marks.

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